Wednesday, August 24, 2011

I'm pretty sure I've mentioned it here before, but, in case I haven't, let me say now that I absolutely adore Dave's Mapper. Look at this terrific dungeon level I created from several of the geomorph sets available through the site:

I like dungeon geomorphs. In fact, I think they're a nigh-essential tool in running a megadungeon-centered campaign. Like all such tools, they're no substitute for individual creativity or hard work, but they definitely have their place. Goodness knows I wish Dave's Mapper had been online when I started my Dwimmermount campaign two years ago; it certainly would have made my life easier at times.

One issue I have with geomorphs is players have a tendency to deduce that there are 8 points (2 on each side) where corridors might be. Granted, they might be deadends, but it just doesn't strike the right chord with me.

Heh, I surfed by Grognardia this morning and read about the MM 2. Then decided to see what kinds of DM creation tools have been invented since my last gaming session in 1991, read some stuff and surf back here and find this. Its like made to order blogging.

Very nifty design tool. I owned the original geomorphs from TSR and liked them, but found them of limited utilty. For ideas and quick visualations of the possible, Dave's Mapper is ideal for what needed this morning.

Dave's Mapper is, indeed, great, but when I used a generated map in an LL game, I had a hell of a time describing corridor and room dimensions to the players.

I was trying to do this old-school, with a mapper, but eventually gave up and came up with some reason to just give the players the map. Looking at the map you've got there, I shudder to think how I'd run it!

I have thought of using post-its to cover sections of the map, revealing areas as PCs progress through the dungeon - they're an impatient group not wise to the ways of old...

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